Chuck Hogan - The Killing Moon - A Novel

This town was nothing more than a laboratory to him now. A proving ground. When he was through with Black Falls, he would toss it at Eddie’s big feet like a bone gnawed clean. This was going to be a town full of zombies by the time Bucky was done.

They say summer colds are the worst, and a bad one was spreading through town. A cold that was to become a countywide flu, which would eventually burn through all of New England like an epidemic.

Bucky saw now that Ibbits had come to him as a kind of prophet. A hobo prophet, appearing out of the desert as they often do, living in his car, on the run from California. A carrier of the disease, and yet, at the same time, a doctor, a medicine man. But a prophet first and foremost. Of doom. Bearing script ure, in the form of a pre script ion — in the form of a recipe. A simple little recipe with simple, everyday ingredients.

A recipe for plague.

Ibbits said meth was the perfect drug if you only did it once. Trick was: How? How do you win a fortune with one pull of the slot machine lever — and never walk into a casino again? Fuck the hottest chick on TV — and never expect to touch her again? Learn the most mind-shattering truth of the universe — and never allow yourself to think it again?

And yet, Bucky did. He had. One time only. Or rather, nine times over the course of one bullet-fast three-day weekend. One seventy-two-hour run. Nine smoked foils. No sleep. No food. No need.

Most of the rush of the first day he had spent working on his cars. Pure gear-head heaven, twenty-four hours straight through without a break, compulsively immersed in the hobby of all hobbies. Mind and hand and wrench and engine: one. Connected. It was all-American nirvana. It was bliss.

Nothing would ever be anything like that first blaze. When eventually he got horny, he’d called Wanda and smoked a foil with her and she went off like a comet. They fucked for hours, a fuckfest beyond human capability, superhuman sex, orgasm upon orgasm, each exploding with intensity. Universe-creating orgasms. Big motherfucking bangs.

That were so good, so right, so complete, so out there, that he couldn’t be bothered now to fuck without it. They had tried a couple of times, Wanda tweaking up alone and then begging him, pleading for his dick. But meth turned him from the ultimate pussy hound into what he thought of as a meth monk. It just wasn’t there for him anymore. You go to the moon, you visit the fucking stars: What was left in Black Falls that could please him? He didn’t need it now, not the way he used to. Or rarely, anyway. Certainly not from bony Wanda. Meth had messed with the switchboard in his head. He was getting off on something else besides sex now. Something — the Idea — had taken its place.

The Idea was what he had caught on to that third day. What the meth had showed him. What it revealed.

A clarity.

Everyday people, he had realized, would kill to feel the way he did. Would slaughter their own parents for a taste of this. Would trade away their kids.

That was when he saw his future. That was when he knew.

Knew immediately that he had found the thing he had been looking for all his life. Not a drug to get high on — no. Every drug that had come through town, that had found its way into lockup, he had test-driven like an impounded car. Even regular speed — nothing was like this shit. Nothing came close. Nothing had this cosmic giddyup.

What he had found here, without searching for it, without even knowing it existed, was a tool. What in other hands was a toy, was in his hands a sharp knife. A cunning weapon.

A low-priced alternative to cocaine, even cheaper than heroin. A high that lasts longer and burns hotter than ’shrooms or acid or anything else out there. A drug that doesn’t take you out of the world but, like a great fuck, plunges you deeper into it. That makes you invincible, immortal, and that’s better to screw on even than coke.

Meth is a blow job for the brain, a hand job for the ego. It writhes naked and moaning in the swelling lap of your soul, bouncing on your hard-on, squeezing your balls, making you come and come and beg for more.

That first high, anyway.

The virgin ride of pure intensity, which Ibbits said you never quite get back to again, but which many people devote the rest of their lives to chasing. Ibbits told him about the effects of the drug on people out west, where he was from: men walking away from their jobs, women from their children, losing houses and cars and selling off everything, including themselves. Religion promises you something glorious just around the corner? Meth actually lets you glimpse it. Lets you hear the angels sing.

Bucky still felt tempted all the time. Especially working these long hours cooking up the stuff. But he saw now another thing the meth had showed him: this was what life is. Chasing your virginities. Chasing your infant satisfactions. That pure bliss of first love (mother). The bewildering, earth-shuddering majesty of your first orgasm. You want it all back. You want to be born again. Life as pure nostalgia.

Everybody everywhere is looking for transcendence, for deliverance, something to devote themselves to. And meth gives you that. At first. Then it starts to reduce you. Bucky had already seen it here in Black Falls. Meth turning men into monkeys. Part of the drug’s joy is that it peels you back to your animal instincts; it strips out higher, more complex emotions such as regret and anxiety. Your needs become meth and sex, in that order. And then eventually just meth. You want nothing else. You know no future, you feel no past. Shame loses its drag on you. Your body doesn’t matter anymore. Only what you put in it. You are a zombie.

Bucky pulled out his toasted bologna and laid it sizzling on a paper towel. He squirted mustard on it, and while it cooled, he wiped his greasy hands on his shorts and changed up the record, laying in his old Kiss Alive II album. Track two: “King of the Night Time World.”

After the revelation, Bucky had gone back to the station lockup to see Ibbits, held there over the long weekend, waiting for a trip out to the county judge on Tuesday. Bucky was all fired up on the confiscated meth, and Ibbits saw this. Bucky let him out and brought him back to his home to pick the man’s brain. He offered him freedom in exchange for information, and, after a liberal hit off his own stash, Ibbits was only too willing. He wrote out recipes and supply lists. Everyday stuff — hydrogen peroxide, acetone, Heet, Pyrex bowls, coffee filters, denatured alcohol, hot plates, cold medicine — much of which Bucky already had around the house and garage, except for the iodine. Against the cost of this, he priced out the product at $100 per gram to start, $1,200 per ounce, $15,000 per pound. He even drew up a business model, a pyramid design, declaring the New England states to be virgin territory, and growing more and more animated at the prospect of the two men going into business together.

At some point around the fourth or fifth time Ibbits was repeating himself, Bucky unwound the AM antenna from his stereo receiver and strangled him with it. He lay Ibbits out on the floor by the fireplace, then returned to poring over the lists, refining the plans in his own mind. Bucky never listened to AM radio anyway. Later he had Eddie drive him back to the station, where he picked up Ibbits’s Escort. The crash, he arranged himself, as he did the fire.

Another big reason for Bucky not to dabble. His taking meth was like pouring napalm on a grease fire. Of all the things the drug had shown him that weekend, the most revealing was Bucky Pail himself. He found out that he had been living behind a secret identity all these years: that of Bucky Pail, Black Falls police sergeant, son of Cecil and Verna, brother of Eddie. But what he was inside, the real deal within the hollow shell he wore, was something beyond extraordinary.